Up With This We Will Not Put

If the deadliest form of violence is poverty, than it cannot be considered an exaggeration to declare that the present worldwide economic policy is a slow-motion genocide. It criminalizes poverty. It provokes suicide. It institutionalizes slavery. It worships exploitation.

We know there are problems, but where are we to direct our energy to combat them? As the call for revolution grows stronger, many on the fence are asking, “But what shall we do?” First we must recognize what we are dealing with so that we can avoid wasting our energies addressing symptoms instead of driving straight at the root cause of the larger situation.

In a competition-based monetary system, pyramid schemes and mergers leading toward an emerging elite which eventually would give rise to a burgeoning oligarchy of immutable owners is an absolute inevitability. In a winner-takes-all, dog-eat-dog system, there will inexorably emerge those wholly committed to acquisition, power and dominance to such a degree that they will stop at nothing to continue to gain more, even when total victory has long since been achieved, and even when they have acquired more than they could expend in a thousand lifetimes.

Major corporations have figured out over the decades how to maximize their profits by outsourcing American jobs overseas. They have figured out that they don’t have to pay their workers, but can instead loan them the money they need to survive with interest that must be paid back. They have figured out how to make products break down as quickly as possible necessitating the consumption of higher quantities of the same goods thus creating larger profit margins for themselves at the expense of their constituents. They have figured out that with enough technological development, the human element becomes less and less necessary to their infantile end-goal of total domination.

In technologically advanced society, incrementally fewer workers are required to produce larger quantities of goods and services for the general population. This phenomenon has been termed “Technological Unemployment,” and is not, theoretically, a bad thing. Technology has freed a large segment of our population from menial, meaningless, repetitive tasks (such as assembly lines) which slowly and methodically drain the life force and spiritual essence from human beings. Technology has the capacity to free us from this monotony. The problem is that our society is still driven by money, and without these meaningless jobs there is no way for the average human to obtain the necessities of life (food, water, housing &c.) which remain commodities for sale whereas they were once taken for granted as the gifts of life. If the population’s only ability to obtain money to afford the necessities of life is by working a “job,” and there is less and less need for such a work force within the overall system, then eventually the system must choose one of two endgame outcomes: change the rules of the game, or execute large numbers of what Henry Kissinger has termed the “useless eaters,” so that the game may continue within its present paradigm under its present ownership. It is up to us as a collective to determine whether the meaning of human life outweighs the imaginary financial costs associated with playing an economic game that is not recognized as real by the natural world.

The math of the situation is undeniable. According to David DeGraw, of the 213 million working-age people in America, there are at present only 100 million full-time workers. This leaves 50% of the working age population to fight over 28 million part-time jobs. And of what few full time jobs exist, 47% of them generate annual incomes under $35k. This data reveals that there is literally no mathematical way for people to keep up with cost of living due to stunning consolidation of wealth at the top.

This increase in wealth has been consolidated so sharply that it is leaving 70% of the population in perpetual debt, thus funnelling public wealth into the hands of a tiny minority, per the system’s explicit structure. Within the architecture of the monetary system currently driving the world and all of its inhabitants off a cliff right now, the initiate sorcerers appointed reign over the magic of money are more capable than ever to create everlasting misery for countless life forms, which extends far beyond the majority of Earth’s human family.

As more of us than ever before are aware of these self-evident truths, the time has come to stop complaining about the oligarchs, banks, and corporations and take action. It is time we begin actively confronting our common enemies that come into our formerly sovereign communities and leverage structures built by our efforts to enslave us.

So what option are we left with? Do we simply shrug our shoulders and internalize the lie that this is simply the way things are? – that our world cannot be changed? – that we are powerless? Is it possible for us to remember the indomitable human spirit within us all that declines to be tamed, rejects injustice, and ignores obvious falsities? We don’t have to hate the people at the top of the pyramid. We don’t have to go to war with the system. We don’t have to fill ourselves with malice for a system which is structured to destroy us. We simply have to stop cooperating.

If you recognize that fossil fuels are contributing to the climate change that threatens all life on this fragile planet, stop consuming gasoline; drive less; bike and walk more. If you recognize America’s military consumes more than 75% of the fossil fuels blamed on American consumers – which in turn directly contributes to climate change – refuse to support the military. If you see that America’s imperialist wars are illegal, become a tax protester and stop funding the mechanisms of the military industrial complex. If you recognize that our income tax system does not pay for the services you expect from government but instead is used as interest payments on a federal debt that balloons to new extremes every fiscal year, stop filing. Stop cooperating with laws which are designed only to inconvenience, disempower and frustrate. If you haven’t hurt anyone or caused anyone any form of loss, you have done nothing wrong and therefore have absolutely no reason to succumb to ontological guilt, bow your head to corrupt law enforcement officials, or kneel beneath the wooden thrones of men in graduation gowns pounding ceremonial hammers.

Stop cooperating with corporations exploiting your efforts for their own profits. if their products are manufactured with toxins that will cause you and your children health problems off of the backs of slave labor, don’t buy them. If their products break down intentionally so you have to buy more of them, figure out how to fix them or find a new source for a similar function. If you find out that a major corporation is funding political corruption or contributing to the destruction of the planet in some way, boycott their products and services. If you recognize that Wal-Mart exists at the expense of your community, deliberately shutting down the businesses of your friends and neighbours, refuse to enter into their stores and find new ways to source your needs. If the only way to source an income to support yourself in your community is to get a job at one of these big box stores thus guaranteeing lower wages for workers who are forced into their ranks, get creative about your life. Don’t work for them. Don’t buy from them. Don’t tolerate their existence. Don’t take no for an answer. Where there is a will there is always a way. When you leap the net will appear. Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

Stop cooperating with the norms imposed by the lies of the mainstream media. If their narrative disempowers you, stop listening to it. If the message is, “This is the way things are and there’s nothing you can do about it,” shut it off. If their advertisements make you feel inadequate, stop watching them, or better yet, boycott products that require the mind control of advertising to secure their ends. If you see an advertisement for a product, it means you don’t need it. Their lies do nothing for you. Their adverts and electronic hallucinations prevent you from thinking of ways out of this trap. Release your consciousness from their clutches.

Before we can know what to do about the world’s problems, we should first stop participating in the harm we are all collectively imposing. No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood. If every one of us recognized the little ways in which we are all individually contributing to the death of us all, progress would be more difficult to ignore. For example, if a product in the grocery store uses excessive packaging for the sake of “convenience” don’t take it off the shelf. It is largely our dual obsession with convenience and entertainment that has contributed to the disastrous mess we all find ourselves in now. Before we can take part in any meaningful activist action for the sake of “doing good in the world” we must first give up the harm we are all causing, or at least recognize the harm we are causing so that we can focus on minimizing it – driving our cars less goes a long way on this front. It’s like a mysterious allergic reaction; you treat it by cutting out absolutely everything in your diet and then slowly adding in different food items until you recognize which ones were making you sick. Many of us may not recognize the systemic harm caused by the seemingly innocuous act of filling up at Exxon, stopping at the McDonald’s drive through, purchasing batteries at Wal-Mart, or blankly staring at the cover of the latest Victoria’s Secret. We must beware of fundamentalism, but at present there seems to be an unacceptable mainstream lack of recognition when it comes to understanding how corporations are transforming our world into a nightmare and why your cooperation with them makes the manifestation of this nightmare possible. But if it is our complicity that allows this insane state of affairs to thrive, then our refusal to cooperate can surely reverse the trend.

Revolution must begin within, but once we have harnessed our will, the course of history will be directed by our thoughts, which will dictate our actions, which will in turn determine the outcome of the habits we form that will either change the world or guarantee we go the way of the dinosaur. The choice is ours, but if we want to remain here it is time to make a total commitment to maturity, evolution and sustainability. It is time we earned our thumbs. If you’re unhappy with the circumstances surrounding us all then recognize that your participation is not optional if change is going to occur. It will not be done by brave men and women somewhere out there – it is going to take every single one of us.

Humans are incredibly powerful beings. As such, our fully-realized potential is the scariest thing those currently seated at the top of the power structure can conceive of. They are absolutely petrified of what might happen if you and I become fully actualized within these advanced human bodies we’ve been gifted in this profoundly influential moment in history. All of their latest actions indicate a ruling class terrified of a shift they know cannot be stopped or reversed. The militarization of police forces, the evisceration of basic human rights, the intentional decimation of human populations through economic austerity, the criminalization of everything, the standardization of concentration camps as a lucrative business model, the dramatic restructuring of formerly democratic societies under corporate rule through so-called “trade negotiations” – all of it indicates a power structure’s vein attempts to maintain power they have enjoyed for generations that they can feel slipping out of their grasp more quickly with every passing day. But they’ve moved too quickly. They’ve exposed their hand. Their hubris has exposed their true colours. Their arrogance has made such a mockery of the mainstream news that even the true believers are beginning to see through the façade. It is becoming impossible to ignore. The corruption has become too perspicuous to deny.

We have endless incentives to shift away from a system that works less and less well, because it’s making us homeless, unemployed, depressed, suicidal, malnourished and broken. We don’t have to evoke a perfect utopian society, we simply have to reject the Orwellian, draconian, tyrannical, totalitarian despotism saturating the planet in apocalyptic doom at present. It is not a complicated venture to propose that it might be possible to create a common sense, political system that would provide a vibrant democracy and legitimately reflect the will of the people – it is our destiny.

A global, unified resistance is already under way, and has thus far already begun expressing itself through the cohesive revolutionary enactment of concepts such as Liquid Democracy, Gift Economy, Negative Interest, Internalization of Costs, Social Dividends, Relocalization of Economic Functions, Peer-To-Peer Finance, and Worker Cooperatives. Humanity’s ultimate revolution is not merely a possibility – it is an inevitability. It is not a potential on the horizon of the future – it is already happening all around us. Get on board now or you’re going to regret it later. Don’t let the fears they have installed into your consciousness keep you from reaching toward a destiny that is your birthright. Don’t waste this precious opportunity by choosing boredom, for this is the most exciting time any of us could have possibly hoped to be alive, and things are just starting. The path of least resistance might seem comfortable but it often leads to disaster. Nobody exonerates the Stazi or Gestapo as “brave hero’s” who were “just doing their jobs,” and the historical memory of this period will not be any different.

The task of saving ourselves is one and the same as the task of healing the planet. If we can heal ourselves, we will as individuals feel less need to express ourselves in harmful ways in the world, and will embrace beauty, truth and justice in ways we could not have conceived of before. If we recognize our responsibility to the planet, to each other and to ourselves, we are charged with the tasks of aligning money with the true expression of our gifts, abolishing systems of rule that allow us to abdicate basic responsibilities, and bringing corporations into line with common sense thinking. It is time to actively pursue the edicts of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equity, equality and solidarity. It is time for us to align ourselves with the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and loving compassion. We must now demand a radically altered society and refuse to take “No” for an answer. We must stop asking permission for that which is our birthright. We must never lose sight of the indisputable fact that meaningful change cannot come from within the system and will not be surrendered wilfully from those at the top of it.

Dispel of the fallacy that you’ll see any reform whatsoever from people who already have jobs in oak-panelled rooms with leather seating. Eradicate the notion that we can solve these problems politically because it is precisely via the political process that we have arrived at this situation. Remember what has amounted from the “Hope” and “Change” campaign slogans of Obama and puppets like him – just more of the same. So-called leaders are chosen from the ranks of the elite and presidents are determined for us based solely on which candidate garners the maximum campaign financing. They can’t change the system for us because the true power brokers put them where they are to take the heat for the decisions being made at our expense. They won’t change the system for us because they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them. As such they do not represent us or our interests. How could they? After all, we the people are utterly incapable of contributing billions of dollars to their campaigns in the manner that the Koch brothers and other oligarchs regularly do. This system is not broken as far as they, the owners, are concerned, for it works exactly the way it was engineered to work – benefiting a few brazen criminals at the expense of everyone else.

We would do well to constantly remind ourselves that real change will not be delivered within the machinery of the present system, no matter how desperately we wish to believe in such delusional wishful thinking. It was recently proven, for example, that the United States – the apparent shining city on the hill – the supposed free world – is in fact not the democratic Republic we believe it to be, and this was scientifically proven. In their collaborative report, Testing Theories of American Politics, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page concluded:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

The 100 largest corporations in the world control governments through lobbying, donations and blackmail, fund academic research so the scientific view of the world adheres to their perspectives, and dominate global consciousness by vandalizing our media with their peculiar philosophies.

Any discussion of incremental change or modest reform is sheer futility at this point. We’re rapidly plummeting toward not only the extinction of our species, but the complete destruction of all known ecosystems on this planet. The time for change was yesterday. The time for radical change is now. All else has failed. All other alternatives have been exhausted. It’s time for a revolution. The only question that remains is, what kind of revolution will we give birth to? Another false revolution financed, steered and guided by those at the top that will once again guarantee their dominance within a new system in the end? Will we bring about yet another steam-valve revolt that does little more than temporarily relieve the overwhelming tension all around us? Whatever kind of revolution we choose, we’d better choose quickly, for the window to change things by means of non-violent methods is closing rapidly before our eyes.